A hardy crowd of 100 braved slick roads and a snowstorm Monday
night, several driving from as far away as Milwaukee and
Dodgeville, to hear Wendell Potter talk about his former job as a
public relations flack for one of the biggest for-profit health
insurance companies in the world.

His new book “Deadly Spin” gives a riveting insider’s account of
some of the unsavory practices that eventually left him, he said,
“unable to look at myself in the mirror.” He shared some of those
war stories Monday night, but many at the Goodman Community Center,
familiar faces from single-payer rallies, were also eager to hear
his take on what will happen next to health care reform. “Here’s
the reality,” he tells them. “It ain’t going to be repealed.”

This week’s vote to repeal the law in the Republican-controlled
House is a “smoke screen” to mask a more sinister threat, he says:
that critics will peel away the best parts of the bill rather than
kill it outright.

They’ll go after the clause that allows parents to cover their
children until they are 26, he warned the crowd. They’ll try to
pump up the share of premiums for-profit companies can put into
overhead instead of patient care. They’ll try to discriminate
against the elderly. They’ll push for exemptions and waivers. And
they’ll blast reform as a “one-size-fits-all” failure while
demanding “greater flexibility to meet the needs of Americans”
because this is the kind of simplistic jargon politicians fall for.
“It may not surprise you that many lawmakers are not very smart,”
Potter says, getting a laugh.

Since leaving CIGNA in 2008, Potter has made it his mission to
try to educate the public on just how powerful the industry
propaganda he used to help spin can be. Two years ago, in a lengthy
Q and A, he told me he feared reform would be crushed by this
PR machine. I caught up to him again shortly after the mid-term
elections, when Republicans had tossed out many of the politicians
who had supported an overhaul. Potter, usually soft-spoken, was
angry. Anybody who knows anything about the decades-long battle to
pass health reform in America, described in fascinating detail in
his book, should have realized what was coming and been better
prepared, he says.

“We lost the messaging battle, and that baffles me,” he says.
“In fact, I’m pretty disgusted. I just don’t get it. A lot of
members of Congress put their political fates on the line. Some of
them were pretty courageous. I will tell you we didn’t see any
evidence of leadership or a messaging strategy during the
campaigning. It didn’t come from the White House. It didn’t come
from anywhere. It was nonexistent. If you don’t have that, and you
have the other side so well-organized and so well-financed, you get
your ass kicked.”

Much of “Deadly Spin” details just how the industry managed to
kick it.

Potter claims President Barack Obama and the pro reformers were
so naive that they fell for what he calls the industry’s “charm
offensive,” a point he repeated Monday night when he told the
audience the industry “was playing the president like a
Stradivarius.” Even as industry executives claimed to be on board,
he says, they were funneling millions of dollars to front groups
spreading “deceptions and lies.” The tea party movement, he claims,
is one result.

Potter’s book, a revealing description of some of the most
secret strategies corporate PR honchos have used for decades to
influence the public and policy on everything from tobacco to
health reform, should be required reading for these snookered
folks. But it also is plenty interesting and informative for
everyone else, even for those who disagree with Potter. You will
learn how the script and the playbook used to punch holes in reform
now have been around since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. The
parallels between the tactics and the hot-button language used to
frighten Americans away from various incarnations of reform —
“fearmongering,” Potter calls it — are fascinating.

He pulls up some historical gems. In 1961, the American Medical
Association launched a campaign against early Medicare legislation,
for example, called “Operation Coffee-Cup.” Across the country the
wives of association members served coffee, chatted and listened to
a recording of the young Ronald Reagan speaking out against — you
guessed it — “socialized medicine.”

If Medicare passes, Reagan warned in language that is echoed by
today’s tea party members, “behind it will come other federal
programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it
in this country, until, one day…we will awake to find that we have
socialism...” and “you and I are going to spend our sunset years
telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was
like in America when men were free.”

Potter also describes the key role he and his colleagues played
in defeating efforts by Bill and Hillary Clinton to pass health
care reform. “I was quite proud to be a part of the effort to make
sure the Clintons’ vision of reform would never be realized,” he
writes in the book.

“At the time, I was still a true believer in both the concept of
managed care and the idea that the free market could work in health
care if the government would just get out of the way. It never
occurred to me that fearmongering and fake grass roots initiatives
were anything to get worked up about, because they were being used
to defeat a reform plan that I thought would be bad for the country
— and for the companies that enabled me to pay my mortgage.”

By 2007 he was the top spokesman for CIGNA, one of America’s
largest health insurance companies. Over a period of two years,
from 2007 to 2009, Potter says insurance companies and HMOs spent
$586 million, derived from customers’ premiums, in political
contributions and lobbying expenses, most of it to attack health
care reform. A particularly amusing but scary section in the book
is devoted to the industry’s campaign against Michael Moore and his
movie “Sicko,” which the health insurance industry feared could
prove as influential as Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” had
proven to be in changing attitudes about global warming.

Top insurance executives set up an elaborate front group whose
main purpose was to discredit the movie, he writes. They held
secret meetings and sent secret memos about how to soften its
impact. They even flew a young man he calls a “reconnaissance
agent” out to Cannes, France, to take notes in the darkened
auditorium of the preview so that they could learn what they were
in for as quickly as possible. He and other flacks held briefings
and compiled a three-ring notebook full of talking points for how
to dismiss the movie and reform as a “government takeover.” The
goal,” he writes, “was to make Moore radioactive to centrist
Democrats in particular.”

And then he got handed a public relations nightmare. A teenage
girl from California died of leukemia in 2007 after CIGNA declined
her pricey claim for a liver transplant, arguing that the surgery
was “experimental.” CIGNA reversed its decision, but too late: The
girl died without having had the operation. Potter says CIGNA sent
a “spy” to her funeral to gather information that might be useful
to the company’s efforts at damage control. That incident, along
with a visit to a health fair in rural Virginia near his parents’
home, prompted Potter to start questioning what he was doing.

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“It became clearer than ever that I was part of an industry that
would do whatever it took to perpetuate its extraordinarily
profitable existence,” he writes. “I had sold my soul.”

What he saw at that fair, he says, was a far different world
than the myth created by the “spin” he had staked his career on. “I
felt as if I’d stepped into a movie set or a war zone. Hundreds of
people... were waiting in lines that stretched out of view.... I
noticed some of those lines led to barns and cinder-block buildings
with row after row of animal stalls, where doctors and nurses were
treating patients.”

That experience, says Potter, a Baptist, was a sort of “divine
intervention” that led him to turn his back on his former
profession and become one of the country’s most outspoken critics
of that world. And so his book ends up being as much a confession
or memoir of an awakening as it is an account of the growth of
corporate PR and the historical battle over reform.

“As I took in the scene at the Wise County Fairgrounds, I
realized that the folks in those lines and animals stalls could
have been my relatives or my parents’ neighbors,” he writes. “I
could tell from their faces that they were people with whom I
shared cultural roots, but who — for whatever reason — simply
hadn’t had the good fortune to land a high-paying job and a cushy
office in a Philadelphia skyscraper.”

A few months later, he quit that job. Colleagues seem to be
doing what he says he would have advised them to do when he handled
PR: ignoring him. They have made few public statements about his
defection and reportedly have refused his invitations to discuss
the issue with him in public.

He told me he expects he will never get another job in corporate
America. “I’ve torched a lot of bridges,” he says. But his
conscience is clear.

“Telling the truth is cathartic,” he writes in “Deadly Spin,”
saying that he plans to continue to try to do everything he can to
atone for his former role as a “spinmeister” for “what I consider
now to be an evil system sustained on greed.”

The rhetoric of Obamacare repeal is just a smoke screen to
obscure the real objective: to preserve sections of the law that
big insurance and its business allies like and strip out those they
don’t like.